Dave Seidel / mysterybear

Photo by Rob Nuuja

Involution by Dave Seidel

When Anton Webern died in 1945, he’d left a legacy involving music of insistent change. His most radical compositions employed a language of quick-shod note and sound color transformation, certainly deployed according to the tone row but in the service of an icy viscerality and a kind of atomistic mysticism that the laws of serialism only partially elucidated. The “minimalist” reaction to the often dogmatic compositional aesthetics to follow was both anticipated and far-reaching and remains so. Dave Seidel’s electronic work emerges from the collaborative fruits of that thorough-going reaction to Schoenberg’s world, but it also incorporates elements of second Viennese School innovation in surprising ways. As the row gave rise to compositional trajectories as diverse as Boulez and 1960s Stravinsky, Seidel’s path was fed and fostered by the variously tempered scales used by La Monte Young and those traveling in his orbit. Beyond the wildly varied combinations of microtonal intervals, Alvin Lucier’s tone collisions also form an integral component of what makes Seidel’s music so unique, but neither of these account for the extraordinary combination of staticity and motion that exist at the heart of the two long compositions on offer here. Both conquer the blow-by-blow concerns of temporality via the sustain, but beneath their crystalline surfaces ripples the oscillating intrigue of constant motion.